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‘But that’s not fair!’ she cried, as if she were an innocent victim.
‘The world is not fair!’ Bennett thundered. ‘As you might know if you would once look beyond the tip of your pretty nose. Every day innocent children are born or sold into slavery, torn from their families at the whim of cruel masters. Have you any idea how much damage you may have done to the Abolition Movement with your wanton, wilful behaviour? Or do you not give a damn?’
‘Of course I do! I have heard and seen and breathed Abolition ever since I was young enough for Mr Wilberforce to bounce me on his knee. But how can I have hurt your cause?’
It galled him to have to explain to her. ‘I have made great progress, rallying support for an Abolition Bill in the House of Lords, which has always been a stumbling block in the past. How effective an advocate do you suppose I will be when it becomes known my wife has been bedded by my most vicious opponent? No one respects a cuckold.’
‘But you aren’t! That’s what I am trying to tell you, if you’d only heed me.’ She leaned towards him, emerging from the shadows into the faint light shed by the street lamps, her arm outstretched.
Bennett resisted the urge to pull her into his arms and reassert his claim upon her, as another part of him longed to do. That was dangerous weakness to which he must not succumb.
Perhaps realising she had exhausted all other means of saving herself, Caroline marshalled her final-line defence. ‘If you divorce me, I may never see Wyn again!’
‘See him again?’ How dared she try to use their son that way, after what she’d done? Her behaviour was a betrayal of the child as much as him. ‘You do not see much of him now that I can tell. You swan into the nursery for an hour or two to amuse yourself. Once you’ve got the boy overexcited and fractious you leave Mrs McGregor to manage him. Wyn would be far better off without a mother who treats him like a plaything to be picked up and cast aside again at a whim.’
Before Caroline could attempt to defend herself from his charges, their carriage came to a stop in front of his club.
‘What are we d-doing here?’ she asked in a dazed, plaintive tone against which Bennett steeled his heart.
The earlier fight seemed to have gone out of her. In a splash of light from the street lamp, Bennett glimpsed her bare arms wrapped around her torso and realised she was shivering.
‘I intend to stay here tonight,’ he announced, then added, ‘You left your cloak.’
‘I d-didn’t think of it until w-we were outside. And I didn’t d-dare go back for fear you’d leave me b-behind.’
He would have been well within his rights to do just that, Bennett mused bitterly. Yet a deeply ingrained code of gentlemanly conduct compelled him to remove his coat and thrust it towards her. ‘Take this.’
Caroline only hesitated an instant before pulling the garment around her.
Now Bennett had one thing left to say to her. Ever since they’d quit Almack’s, part of his mind had remained detached, pondering how best to handle this beastly situation. One step was imperative. ‘You must get out of town first thing tomorrow and stay away until the worst of the tattle dies down.’
Expecting her to object, he was surprised when she replied, ‘Where shall I go? Brighton?
Bath?’
‘Good Lord, no! The gossip will spread there in no time and word of your whereabouts would get back just as fast. You must retire to some place as far away as possible from society.’
He’d considered and discarded a score of options. Now, suddenly, the ideal destination occurred to him. ‘The Isles of Scilly. I have a house there, on Tresco.’
He hadn’t thought of the place in years. Now that he had, it seemed a perfectly fitting destination for his adulterous wife.
How could she have been so foolish and unguarded as to place everything she cared about in jeopardy? As the carriage sped through Kensington towards Sterling House, the harsh tribunal of her conscience chilled Caroline worse than the damp cold of the windy April night.
After all, she was not some green girl fresh from the country in her first Season. Over the years she had seen enough scandal to recognise the impropriety of slipping into that curtained alcove with a man other than her husband. She should have known how incriminating it would look if they were discovered there, even without the kiss.
That damnable kiss! How could she have let it happen? She still found it difficult to reconcile the scoundrel who’d taken such a liberty, then callously dragged her name through the dirt, with the charming gentleman who’d traded witty banter with her over the card table and cast admiring glances at her on the dance floor. She’d thought it was only a harmless, flattering flirtation, like a number of others she’d enjoyed in the past without ever compromising her reputation.
When her husband angrily forbade her having any further contact with a man who looked at her in a way he had not in years, her long-simmering resentment had suddenly come to the boil. She could not simply turn her back on her ardent admirer without a single word of explanation or apology. The last thing she’d expected when he beckoned her into that alcove was to find his arms suddenly around her and his lips pressing upon hers.
For an instant, she’d been too shocked to react. Then she’d been further paralysed with uncertainty and shame, fearing she had led him to believe his amorous attentions would be welcome. When she’d finally come to her senses and been about to pull away, the card room suddenly went quiet and she’d plunged into her worst nightmare.
Would Bennett truly go through with his threat to seek a divorce? Until lately, he hadn’t seemed to care how much other men admired her. She’d once heard it quipped that every gentleman of her acquaintance was besotted with her, except her husband. Though she’d pretended to be amused at the time, those words dealt a humiliating blow. What did it signify how many men desired a married woman if her husband was not among them?
In the early days of their marriage she had eagerly welcomed Bennett to her bed, deceiving herself that the pleasure he brought her was a token of the love he could not express in other ways. Later she’d faced the harsh truth that his ardour sprang from nothing more than physical desire. He had never felt anything deeper for her and he never would. In recent years, even his desire had waned. Caroline wished she could say the same. She had finally succeeded in quelling the feelings for her husband that had only made her miserable. Yet there were still nights when she lay in her empty bed aching for his touch.
Was it possible Bennett knew Astley was lying, but had seized upon this opportunity to be rid of a wife who had proven such a disappointment to him? Hurt and angry as that thought made her, Caroline was far angrier with herself for giving him such a fine excuse to cast her off.
Her husband was right about one thing, unfortunately. If he wanted a divorce, he could likely get one even though she had never committed adultery. Her single public indiscretion would be taken as proof that she must have done far worse things in private. And Astley’s deceitful boasting would be taken as fact, even if he later recanted.
After that, life as she knew it would be over.
As far as society was concerned, she might as well be dead. She would be exiled to the dullest depths of the country, forced to live on whatever pittance Bennett chose to give her. No lady who valued her good name would ever be permitted to associate with such a scandalous outcast. But by far the worst deprivation was that she would never be allowed to see her little son again.
The prospect of losing Wyn battered Caroline’s heart. Bennett had accused her of not caring about their son, but he did not understand.
The moment the carriage came to a halt in front of Sterling House, she hurried inside, throwing off Bennett’s coat. The whiff of his clean, bracing scent that clung to the garment roused a gnawing hunger within her that she’d spent years striving to subdue.
Stopping by her rooms, she bid her maid pack a trunk for the journey on which they would set out the next morning.
‘The Isles of Scilly, my lady? Why in the world are we going there?’
‘It was the earl’s idea, Parker.’ Caroline hoped that excuse would forestall any further questions. ‘We must leave at first light and I’m not certain how long we’ll be gone, so get to work.’
‘Very well, ma’am.’ Parker set about her task with a sulky air.
Leaving her maid to pack, Caroline rushed to the nursery. Though she’d arrived home much earlier than usual, Wyn was already asleep. She crept to his bed and perched on the edge of it, listening to his soft, even breathing.
‘Your papa thinks I don’t care about you,’ she whispered, not wanting to wake her sleeping child, yet hoping some part of him might hear and understand. ‘But I do love you very much and have since long before you were born.’
At first she’d wanted a baby as a way to please her husband and prove that she could fulfil her chief duty as a wife. But when she’d finally become pregnant and felt that tiny life grow and move within her, she began to cherish him for his own sake and look forward to giving him all the love and happiness most of her childhood had lacked.
But nothing had turned out as she’d hoped. ‘I had such a hard time bearing you. And afterwards, you were a fretful little thing and wouldn’t feed properly.’
Caroline heaved a deep, shuddering sigh as she recalled the shrill, angry shrieks of that tiny creature, his face a raw mottled red. The grave, accusing looks of the doctors still haunted her, as they’d shaken their heads and whispered together. She’d felt like such a terrible mother—rejected by her own child when he was barely out of her womb.
Though Bennett hadn’t said so, she sensed he was disappointed in her inability to succeed at something so simple and natural. He’d engaged Mrs McGregor and a wet nurse for her baby, who’d immediately begun to thrive in their care.
The gaiety and admiration of society had helped ease the sting of her failure. But her evening engagements often lasted late into the night, making her sleep the next morning until nearly noon.
‘I visited the nursery as often as I could.’ Her heart ached with the memory. ‘But I was afraid to pick you up in case I dropped you or made you cry.’
His nurse, a brusque Scotswoman who intimidated Caroline no end, had made it clear she wished the mistress would not come to the nursery too often and disrupt the young master’s routine. To her shame, she had allowed herself to be pushed out of her son’s life.
She could not let his father banish her entirely!
Wave after hot wave of anger seared through her. Anger at Bennett, who had stubbornly refused to believe her. His accusations that Wyn would be better off without such a mother had hurt far more than his charges of infidelity. Anger at the law, which punished a wife’s infidelity so harshly while letting a husband take a dozen mistresses with impunity. That same unjust law decreed that children belonged to their fathers—sons especially. A divorced mother was considered an immoral influence, unfit to raise the offspring she had borne. Bitterest of all was Caroline’s anger at herself for not realising how much her harmless flirtations and one moment of heedless impropriety could cost her.
Just then her little son stirred in his sleep, making Caroline fear he might wake and take fright at her presence. Instead he snuggled closer to her, with a murmur of the sweetest contentment. A warm, brooding ache spread through her chest, cooling the fierce fire of her anger.
‘It is not too late,’ she vowed to her sleeping son, and to herself. ‘It cannot be. I will become the kind of mother I always wanted to be.’
After a pensive moment she added in a whisper so soft she could barely hear it herself, ‘At least for as long as your father will let me.’
Chapter Two
The next day, when he judged it late enough that his wife must be on the road to Cornwall, Bennett returned home. He looked forward to a sound sleep in his own bed, having scarcely got a wink the night before.
Every time he’d closed his eyes, the memory of his wife in the arms of his enemy had risen to taunt him. He’d also been besieged by his allies in the Abolition Movement. When word of the scandal reached them with disgusting rapidity, they’d flocked to the club, anxious to advise him. To a man, they looked forward to seeing Astley dragged through the mud. They also agreed it was imperative for Bennett to seek a divorce as quickly as possible. He had assured them that was his intention. But now doubts began to gnaw at his resolve.
Not doubt of her guilt, of course. He was convinced of that, in spite of her desperate protests to the contrary. He had long known Caroline to be a naturally passionate woman. For a time it had been the saving grace of their marriage. Now it had become the rock on which their faltering union would wreck at last.
And yet, seeing her in the arms of another man made him realise how much he missed their often-tempestuous physical relations. It had been the one area of his life where he’d been able to escape his own rigid self-control. He’d sometimes thought of it as performing the function of a safety valve on a steam engine. Without that occasional release, he could not work at optimal capacity without a dangerous build-up of pressure.
But after everything involved with the birth of their longed-for son had gone so disastrously wrong, he’d been reluctant to risk getting his wife with child again too soon. By the time he might have considered it, they had grown so far apart that it would have been like bedding a perfect stranger.
Mortified and furious as he was over Caroline’s betrayal, Bennett could not pretend she was entirely responsible for the failure of their marriage. He was every bit as much to blame for having pursued her so relentlessly and rushed her into marriage before their infatuation had had an opportunity to cool. If he had not let desire overcome his reason, he would have seen they were far too different in far too many ways to be compatible outside the bedchamber.
At the time those differences had only added fuel to the overwhelming passion that had possessed him. Too late he’d realised that something so combustible was apt to burn out just as quickly. Now he knew he should have married a woman with whom he had more in common, one he might have been better able to understand.
Glimpsing the stately turrets of Sterling House in the distance, rising behind a screen of majestic elm trees, Bennett looked forward to seeing his young son. Wyn was the main reason for his doubts about seeking a divorce. He’d experienced first-hand the bitterness of a shattered family. He did not want that for his son.
Not that Wyn was apt to pine for Caroline as some children might for an absent mother. According to Mrs McGregor, his stylish countess spent more time each day resting from the previous late night or grooming for some approaching engagement than she did in the nursery. The odd hours she did spend there only served to disrupt the child’s sensible, healthy routine, spoiling him with gifts and sweets, making him overexcited from romping about. And when she’d amused herself and grown tired of his company, or when the little fellow grew fretful, she would simply hand him back to the long-suffering Mrs McGregor.
As long as Wyn had his faithful nurse and one responsible parent, surely the child would manage well enough.
That meant he would have to be an even more constant presence in his young son’s life, Bennett reminded himself. From the time Wyn was very young, he had made certain to visit the nursery as often as possible to enquire if the child had slept well, if his appetite was satisfactory, if he was in good health and spirits. When Wyn was old enough, Bennett began to make a point of reading to him or taking him for walks around the estate, both of which Mrs McGregor heartily approved.
One fatherly duty he dreaded was the task of explaining Caroline’s departure and the breakdown of their marriage in a way his young son could understand, while sparing him the worst of it. Though Bennett had no idea how he would find the right words, he knew he must try. He would not see the little fellow confused and anxious, left to piece together the shameful truth from the tattle of servants, as he’d once done.
The moment he entered Sterling House, Bennett headed immediately for the nursery to check on his son. He hoped Caroline had not been so thoughtless as to subject the child to an overwrought farewell.
When he entered the large, sunny room on the second floor of the east range, all was quiet apart from the soft click of knitting needles and the faint squeak of the rocking chair. Bennett’s gaze skipped over the familiar figure of Mrs McGregor, seeking his son.
‘Where is Wyn?’ He pitched his voice low in case the boy was sleeping. ‘This is not his usual nap time.’
‘No, my lord.’ The nurse’s long knitting needles froze in mid-stitch. ‘If he were here, he’d be awake by now. But he’s gone away on that wee holiday with the countess. Were you hoping to bid them farewell before they left?’
‘Holiday?’ Bennett repeated the word as if he’d never heard it before and was trying to grasp its meaning. ‘What holiday? Where has she taken him?’
An indignant scowl clenched the nurse’s sharp features. ‘I thought it seemed most irregular, but her ladyship insisted she was acting on your instructions.’
It was true he had bidden Caroline away. But he had not given her permission to take Wyn, let alone ordered it. ‘Did she say where they were going? How long ago did they leave?’
‘This morning, my lord, earlier than I’ve ever seen her ladyship out of bed before. She said they were going to your house on the Isles of Scilly.’
Suddenly Bennett found himself teetering on the edge of a precipice. Just because Caroline had told Mrs McGregor they were going to the islands did not mean it was true. What if his wife had run away with her lover and taken his son with them—to the Continent, perhaps, or to Astley’s accursed plantation in the West Indies?
The very notion threatened to push Bennett over the edge into a bottomless abyss, but he stifled his panic to concentrate on action. Wherever Caroline had gone, he would track her down and fetch his son home, where the boy belonged.
Five days after their precipitous departure from Sterling House, Wyn Maitland tugged on the sleeve of his mother’s pelisse. ‘How much longer until we get to that silly place, Mama?’
Wyn had asked that question at least once a mile on the three hundred of their journey to Penzance, and even more often since they’d boarded this ship for the islands. With each repetition, his words grated harder and harder on Caroline’s frayed nerves. A sharp answer burned on her tongue, demanding to be spit out. Or perhaps it was the bile that rose in her throat every time the ship lurched in heavy seas.
One thought alone kept her from bidding the child to hold his tongue. He had not asked to accompany her on this long, tedious, uncomfortable journey. She had taken him from his safe, snug nursery, dragging him into the wilds of Cornwall and out to sea. If either of them had reason to be irritable with the other, it was her son with her, not the other way round.
‘Quite soon, now, dearest.’
‘I hope you’re right, ma’am,’ grumbled her lady’s maid, who sat on the bench opposite them in the cramped, dimly lit cabin. ‘When we boarded, they said it would be no more than eight hours’ sailing with fair winds. How long has it been now?’
‘Nearly twelve hours.’ Caroline heaved a dejected sigh. ‘I hope the servants will still be awake by the time we reach the house.’
It was all that had sustained her for the past few days, as she’d discovered the difficulty of travelling with a young child and caring for him day and night—the vision of a pretty country house with its friendly staff of caretakers to welcome them. The first thing she would order was a warm pot of chocolate for her and Wyn to sip in front of a crackling fire. Once her little son was tucked in for the night, she would soak away the chills and kinks of her journey in a hot bath.
‘I don’t care if they’ve gone to bed,’ grumbled Albert, the young footman who made the fourth member of their travelling party. ‘Somebody had better stir themselves to fix a poultice for my ankle.’
He had taken a fall a few hours ago, when the ship pitched sharply.
‘I’m sure they’ll be glad to.’ Caroline sought to lighten the footman’s sullen temper. It was clear both he and Parker were disgruntled about accompanying her on this journey. Once the servants realised they might be in for an extended stay on the island, she feared they would desert her. ‘How is your ankle?’
‘Getting worse by the hour, ma’am,’ Albert replied in a reproachful tone as if he blamed her for his misfortune. ‘Swelled up and paining like the devil.’
‘How much longer until we get there?’ Wyn asked yet again. ‘I miss Greggy. Why could she not come with us on this holiday?’
Caroline had asked herself that same question. How much easier would this journey have been for both of them if Wyn’s capable nurse were there to look after him and answer his endless questions? But Mrs McGregor’s presence would have been a double-edged sword, she reminded herself. How could she hope to make good her vow to become a more attentive mother to her son while his nurse lurked about, always coming between them and subtly criticising everything she tried to do?
‘Mrs McGregor is long overdue for a holiday of her own.’ It was the truth. Caroline strove to stifle her protesting conscience. The woman did deserve a holiday, whether or not she chose to take one.
‘What about Papa?’ asked Wyn. ‘Why didn’t he come with us?’
Her son’s question tore at Caroline. She wondered if Wyn would ever ask for her after she had been wrenched from his life. And if he did, how would Bennett respond to his son’s pleas? Would he even care?
‘I’m sure your father would like to be with us.’ She uttered that well-meant falsehood with all the sincerity she could rally. ‘But you know he is terribly busy in the House of Lords, passing laws for the good of the country.’
That part was true, at least. Unlike some of his fellow peers, the earl took his duties in Parliament very seriously. Because he did not align himself on every issue with one particular faction, he was often able to cast a deciding vote or broker a compromise. But there was one matter on which he would never compromise—the abolition of slavery. Much as Caroline resented her husband’s mistrust and feared his threat to divorce her, she could not help but admire his integrity and his devotion to such a noble cause.
‘How much longer until we get there?’
Fortunately for Caroline, she was spared the need to answer. At that moment, from the deck above, came the distant muffled call, ‘Land ho!’
Those were two of the most welcome words she’d heard in weeks. ‘Very soon, my love. Before long we will be warm and fed, with solid ground beneath our feet and no more miles to travel tomorrow.’
Wyn gave a cheer while Parker and Albert exchanged a look of relief.
An hour later, they found themselves ashore on a dark, moonless night. It might not have been so very cold, but the damp wind gusted hard enough to penetrate every layer of clothing, chilling the flesh beneath.
‘Where are ye bound for, ma’am?’ asked the young man who heaved their luggage into a cart pulled by a small dark horse. ‘Dolphin Town? The inn at New Grimsby?’
How large was this island? Caroline wondered. On a globe it had looked like one of a cluster of pebbles kicked into the sea by the long-toed boot of Cornwall.
